Journal

I love and fear earthquakes. The idea that the world itself is shifting beneath me inspires awe. But there’s always a touch of panic in the first second of rumbling, when the length and intensity of the quake is still an unknown. How bad is this going to get? Is this the Big One? Am I about to die in my bed from a collapsing ceiling?

Man of Steel

We’ve all seen the teaser trailer for “Man of Steel”, right? Of course we have.

I’m not a Zach Snyder fan. I find his directing more at home in a video-game cut scene than on a movie screen. So imagine my surprise when the new teaser trailer came out of the oven smelling for all the world like a genuine, heartfelt, wide-eyed Terrence Malick flick.

So yeah, Higgs Boson. That happened. Someone’s getting the Nobel. No question about it. If you don’t know why Higgs Boson is exciting and game changing for physics, Gizmodo hipped me to this video, watch it if you like to learn.

Cool, all good? Because something else happened on Wednesday. Nature magazine published that Jörg Dietrich, an astronomer at the University of Munich Observatory, and his team, have quite possibly observed the large-scale structure filament intersections in which galaxy clusters occur.

In English: Dark Matter. We, the species, have very, very possibly (assuming this new observation isn’t some instrumental artifact) observed one of the hidden tendrils that extend everywhere. The substrate of the Universe. The thread of creation.

Such tendrils of Dark Matter have theoretically been invisible because they lack density. But the team in Germany believe they have found a single tendril 18 megaparsecs long that sews two galaxies together, and that’s located 2.7 billion light-years away from Earth.

Two galaxie clusters, Abell 223 and Abell 222 seem to be sewn together with unimaginably long, dark, filament not visible to the human eye.